Mitchell’s laws: The more budgets are cut and taxes inceased, the weaker an economy becomes. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
==========================================================================================================================================
O.K., I admit it. I hope we discover some form of life on Mars, or barring that, evidence that life once existed no Mars — or on one of Jupiter’s or Saturn’s moons, or on an asteroid, or somewhere.
O.K., I admit it. Years ago, I hooked up to SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intellegence) and sat fascinated as the graph spun across my computer, irrationally hoping, like a lottery ticket holder, I (or really, my computer) would be the one to discover a signal.
And I admit to being disappointed that we have found nothing, nothing and more nothing. But I was encouraged by a recent article titled, “Odds of Finding Alien Life Boosted by Billions of Habitable Worlds.”
Yes, I find this reassuring, and perhaps you do too. But I don’t know why, because finding intelligent life elsewhere would be the worst thing that ever could happen to planet earth. Finding lower life forms would be fun and exciting, but intelligent life would be a disaster.
Think of all the nations on earth. Have any of them not been involved in a war? Is there one that has not attacked or been attacked? I doubt there ever has been a time in human history, when there has been no war or something very similar to war.
Our sports involve winning and losing — quasi war. Our children play with electronic war games. Back when I was young, we played cowboys vs. Indians. Today, kids play me vs. aliens. And there were our wars with Britain and Mexico. Heck, we even invaded Guatemala and Panama, for heavens sake, not to mention (please don’t) Vietnam and Korea. And remember Desert Storm?
And just think; we’re the good guys!!
Not only do we kill humans in wars and drive-by shootings and assorted other crimes, but we kill the less intelligent animals. We do it just for the pleasure of killing. It’s called “hunting.” And we kill for research. And for food.
The “lower” animals kill each other for food and they butt heads for sex. Bacteria kill. Viruses, which are at the lowest end of the life scale kill. It is in the nature of life as we know it, to kill.
And now we wish to find not just life, but intelligent life (“intelligent” meaning almost as smart as, or smarter than, us). Are we nuts?
If alien, intelligent life in any way resembles terrestrial life, the first thing that will happen is, it will want to kill us. For sport. For research. For food. Or simply to take over our planet’s resources. There simply is no question about this. We did it to native Americans. The British did it everywhere. Genghis Khan, Hannibal, Alexander, Japan. We kill.
If we’re lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it, they won’t kill us; they’ll enslave us — then kill us and eat us. We’ve done the enslaving thing, too.
The universe has existed for a bit under 14 billion years. The earth has not existed for even half that time, at less than 5 billion years. Homo sapiens have walked the earth for only 200,000 years and evidence for what we call “civilization,” i.e. permanent settlements, is merely about 10,000 years old — less than one millionth of the age of the universe.
Then consider the massive advances in our war capabilities in less than the past 100 years. The America of today could destroy the World War II America in an hour. Keep that in mind as you consider the likelihood we would discover intelligent life only 100 years more advanced than us. They would rule us at the twitch of their little fingers (assuming they have little fingers). They’d enslave us, or eat us or experiment on us or use us for hunting or other amusements.
Or what if they were 100 years less advanced than us. We’d do the same to them. It’s in our nature; it’s in the nature of life as we know it, “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson).
So while finding some form of life might be exciting, finding intelligent life could destroy us, and our only hope is that the universe is so large, they couldn’t get to us. Yet even knowing this, there is in the back of my mind, that nagging hope we find them, somewhere. And I don’t know why.
Do you feel the same?
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com
==========================================================================================================================================
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption + Net exports
#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
The destruction of Native Americans, Hawaiians, and others resulted primarily from contact itself. Introduced diseases killed 90% or more of the populations, no matter what the intentions of the European visitors were. The same thing could happen to us if aliens ever visit here.
On the other hand, areas like China and India that avoided this fate are now taking advantage of what they learned from their conquerors. Of course there was and still is a lot of cruelty and injustice along the way. But if the aliens are not so advanced or so “alien” that we can’t understand them at all, in a few hundred years after the “conquest” we might be the ones running the show.
Hopefully truly advanced aliens would not want either of these scenarios and would give us a gentle introduction to the larger galactic community, letting us adjust to it at our own pace. That would be the best outcome we could hope for.
LikeLike
I just saw the movie. They kill us first, no enslaving or eating. They’re after our resources. They use electromagnetic fields to detect and disintegrate us, and to protect themselves, but their sensors are line of sight, and don’t work through glass, so if you’re not in direct visual contact they can’t find you. If you can attack them with a microwave gun while their lightning is flashing, it disrupts them and when their shields are weakened you can kill them with regular bullets. They look like metallic robots, when their shields are gone.
LikeLike
actually, apart from the Earth, the planets in our solar system are pretty inhospitable, so it’s no wonder that we haven’t found any intelligent life on them.
i’m in that camp of people who believe that if we found intelligent life, it would have to be humanoid, so they would have to look more or less like us and their home planet would have to be more or less like ours.
also, i wouldn’t be too believing of our government (look at the false statements, as you do, that they make on the national debt or on the role of taxes). they, as most governments on the planet, consider (understandably so) the discovery of intelligent life, especially more technologically advanced lifeforms, to be a national security issue (as you suggest above), so you can’t realistically expect them (and, by extension, scientists who get government funding) to be truthful about that to the unsuspecting public.
a few astronauts from the 60s and 70s have come forth and said that they have had strange experiences suggestive of contact with alien life.
one astronaut that was on one of the Apollo missions said that they were “followed” by “something” and it wasn’t a rock, cuz whenever they made adjustments to their flight path, the “thing” adjusted with them.
another one said that, during a film shoot of an experimental fighter jet, “something” was “tailing” the plane and, actually, performing “impossible” maneuvers like flying circles around the jet as it was flying thru the air at high speeds.
and another one said that, during another film shoot, a flying saucer appeared out of nowhere, flew down and landed in a dry lake bed in front of the film crew. it sat there for a while as if to allow them to film it and when they came up too close, it shot up into the air and shot away.
it’s easy to discount these stories when they come from the public. it’s a little harder to discount when they come from astronauts, who should know better.
so, i personally am an “agnostic” when it comes to public statements about whether or not we have discovered intelligent life. i’m not sure i believe that we have, but i’m also not sure i believe we haven’t, cuz if the government did have evidence of the existence of more advanced alien lifeforms, there’s NO WAY they’re gonna tell that to the public. and it’s totally understandable why…
which reminds me, did you ever see the movie “Contact” with Jodie Foster? if you haven’t, then pls do take a look at it, cuz it’s a great movie. it very much relates to what you say above…
LikeLike
You might enjoy this if you’ve got two hours: http://www.booktv.org/Watch/13308/Space+Chronicles+Facing+the+Ultimate+Frontier.aspx
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some very interesting observations and connections between space exploration and economics/politics.
LikeLike
Thank you for this post, Roger. I have always believed as you do: “If alien, intelligent life in any way resembles terrestrial life, the first thing that will happen is, it will want to kill us. There simply is no question about this.”
Agreed, and even if they are too far away to reach us, then we will still have the problem here on earth of the 1% exploiting the discovery of alien life to further boost their wealth and power. Instead of a “global war on terror,” we will have a “cosmic war on terror.” We must be further enslaved for our “protection.”
Many people yearn for extraterrestrials to save us. They think that if we had proof of intelligent alien life, then humanity would change for the better. Nonsense! This is the perennial opiate of praying to the spirits. If extraterrestrials DID come to earth, it would be as conquerors. They would enslave us, eat us, perform nightmarish experiments on us, and so on.
“Our only hope is that the universe is so large, they couldn’t get to us.”
It’s large all right. At the speed of light, we could travel seven times around the world in one second. Yet even at that velocity, it takes 6.8 hours for light to travel from our sun to the planet Pluto (at aphelion). Outside our solar system, the very nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 light years away. Besides, according to the theory of relativity, no physical object can travel at the sped of light anyway, since it would become infinitely massive.
LikeLike